Truck terminals: A winner at Umbro

When Umbro was purchased by Nike, in 2007, a period of investment and improvement at the company's UK facilities followed. This included vehicle computer terminals for its warehouse operation from DLoG.

The average pick is tens of thousands of pieces per day, with differing daily ratios between footwear and apparel. Umbro used to operate its own enterprise resource planning software.When the company moved to Nike's preferred platform, SAP, great effort went into making sure it could still cope with the same product volumes using the new system, with the same number of staff.

One of the few issues was the truck mounted computers used for stocking and picking information.

Scanning using the new SAP software on the old truck-mount PCs took about 5 seconds per item. SAP recommended DLoG's hardware based on experience of another customer with similar problems.

A 10in DLoG unit was trialled, but with the smaller screen the text shrunk slightly. DLoG replaced the trial unit with a 12in one. An MCP6 with a 1.6GHz dual-core processor was chosen.

Moving to the rugged DLoG MPC6 truck-mounted PCs resulted in a one second scan time - saving 4 seconds on every item scanned.